A progressive liberal Grandma cooks and tries to find a job, after losing her job of 18 years. Can an older RN find full time work or enough part time work to satisfy her budget needs and help raise her grandkids? What can grannie cook for a family of 6 on a miserly budget? Can a knitter afford her yarn on unemployment?. This blog is morphing from its original content to reflect the realities of 2011.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Our nation is being destroyed by the right, as Dem leadership wimps out

The Right's Garden of False Narratives

By Phil RockstrohSeptember 20, 2007

Editor’s Note: At the core of the rot that is destroying the American Republic are the many false narratives that have replaced the nation's real history. The Right has proved adept at creating these alluring story lines and selling them through a vast and sophisticated media apparatus, while the mainstream press goes silent or plays along.

In this guest essay, poet Phil Rockstroh explores the personal and societal implications of foisting false reality on a nation:

One would think that from the cries of (feigned) indignation and calls for repentance arising from conservatives regarding Move-On.org's ad in the N.Y. Times that the liberal-leaning group had not simply questioned the insights and intentions of a public servant, promoting, in a public forum, the policy of an illegal and immoral occupation of a sovereign nation; rather, the folks of Move-On.org had committed blasphemy against the holy name of some revered saint -- General Mary Petraeus, Mother of God.

The false outrage of perpetually offended conservatives serves as cover for the true outrages of our era, including: truncated civil liberties, rising levels of social and economic inequality and injustice, and foreign wars of aggression waged by an insular and secretive executive branch and fought by a permanent underclass.

The outrages keep arriving, because the collective imagination of the citizen/consumers of the US, arbitrated by a careerist media elite, has been, for decades, in the thrall of false narratives that serve the interests of the elite of the corporate/militarist classes.

Concurrently, a sense of unease and despair, due to a sense of personal and collective powerlessness before exploitive power, has created the tone and tenor of the times, and begot the phenomenon of supine liberalism and Viagra conservatism. (In this way, liberals stand fecklessly by, as the public is, time and time again, screwed by the decrepit schemes of the right.)